Pokets

I agree about Soul Warden as she isn't particularly thematic, but I did some playtesting without her and didn't have enough life gain triggers. I like Seraph Sanctuary to help with this, although I worry about the uncolored mana not working with 15 cards in the deck.
I also agree that Answered Prayers is not great here, but it was essentially the inspiration for this deck (capitalize on life gain into angels) so I struggle removing it.
The artwork for Luminarch is perfect, but the card is too expensive, as is Lyra and Jubilation.

Some removal would definitely improve the deck, what about some Fiend Hunters to keep with the theme?

I did look at Divine Visitation and loved it here, but it's price puts it out of range. Single cards over $10 are sort of unofficially banned in my play group.

I love it. Slug decks are like a giant AOE taunt. I see some personal favorites here; I have never seen more hate generated at the table than by Manabarbs, partly since my group does not really play dorks or rocks.

I kinda like your perspective on "automatons" as you called them. We all have to try on new concepts when we first confront them, but eventually we are able to sort them, adapt them, and re-combine them. I read the deck and it did remind me of this; a person confronting a new sociological structure isn't that different from a player confronted with someone challenging the meta with their plays.

I guess my tendency is to approach what you would call mental prisons and I would call concepts from a more positive side, although I acknowledge the dark side exists. Sociological constructs, human communication, programming, science, relationships all lean heavily on shared concepts, like your stories, and knowledge of that shared idea and the ability to assimilate it grants increased intellectual access.

Take for instance the scientific concept of the ecological balance between photosynthesis and cellular respiration, sometimes called the carbon cycle. Imagine two people, one who possesses knowledge of this concept and the other who does not, are having a conversation about climate change. It's like speaking a word in a foreign language, which needs to be translated before comprehension can occur. It is something the field of semiotics deals with, a hobby of mine since my days in college, in particular biosemiotics (I studied plant/insect interactions, but that is a tale for another day). We must be able to translate our personal thoughts into signs (the semiotics term) and those signs must be translatable back into someone else's thoughts. If we could download the original thought directly into the mind of the second person it would be unintelligible to their mind, like the same code but written in Java instead of C++. They cannot really hope to proceed productively in this conversation until the missing concept has been assimilated by the person without it. We will have a much better chance at success trying to teach this to them if they have already assimilated the pre-concepts of plants, atmosphere, soil, basic chemistry, decomposers, basic astronomy, other cycles including the water cycle, etc.

We should probably all be able to have a conversation about climate change, so we decide that all students should learn the carbon cycle, as well as all the pre-concepts. Is it controlling and dominating of us to demand everyone learn this thing, with their having no say in the matter? Probably. But do we want people running around living ignorant of how the planet works and the impact of their lives on it? Probably not.

My point is that our mental prisons do not have to imprison us, they can actually free us to achieve something quite powerful, understanding and relating to a thought coming from another human's mind, despite having different perspectives and life experiences, different brain chemistries, and even, God forbid, coming from different political parties. This is a large part of why I became a teacher.

I teach middle school science and I freakin love it.

I am really sorry to hear that. It probably rings a bit hollow across the void of the internet and since I barely know you, but I mean it anyways.

I have noticed it becoming increasingly difficult to have a conversation, especially political, with someone and feel like I am talking to a real person with actual views, views they have thought about and understand. So often they just repeat the nonsense they have read on Twitter or Facebook; more of an ideology wearing a human skin than a person who agrees with an ideology, if that makes any sense.

In education we are completely trapped in the logical fallacy of argumentum novitatem; you might call this a mental prison. We desperately seek new and shiny solutions to problems we could solve with what we have now if we just stuck with it long enough.

Also, per your example: since you brought it up, does that mean I "win"? :)

Evil can easily take the appearance of good. In the case of symbiosis, animals do not work together or cooperate out of moral goodwill, but out of self-preservation. They have chosen an arrangement that is the most beneficial to them of all arrangements they have found. It is our mistake to apply human morality to it when it has no place there. Animals do not live "without morals" as you put it; morality itself is a human construct that has no meaning applied to other organisms.

I would have to disagree with you about "the six words". I did not chose those words because I have been told to. Those are the traits I have chosen to live by myself because I believe in their power, at a personal level, not mid-control mental slavery level. Those are the traits of people I desire to be around, that I want in my life. You must not have much experience with the U.S. public school system if you think we, as in institution, are teaching mercy, compassion, grace, or honor on any large scale.

I would definitely disagree that status, fashion, and religion make humanity great. Religion has been, and will always continue to be, something that people have misused for power. For many people religion probably does function as a mental prison of sorts. What I know is this: I have lived my life in two phases. In the first I lived for myself. I did what I wanted; I did whatever I thought would make me happy. That phase ended in depression, addiction, and debt. So I tried the opposite way as an experiment. I lived for others, volunteering my whole life for a year without a concern for my future, health, or wellbeing. At the end of that time I knew happiness like I would never have believed possible and found meaning and purpose that filled all the empty places inside. I don't care what society thinks about "the six words" because I know firsthand their power, and it is a power that can break all mental slavery.

......wait a second
You sly dog! You got me monologuing!
tap 4 red, activate Pyrohemia x4

I am not a fan of participation awards or arranging things so there is no loser. It's good to be competitive, but one lesson it has taken most of my life to learn is that it has its place and its limits. You don't want to be the one giving free money to little Billy because he landed on a motel in Monopoly; it ruins the game and teaches him a potentially damaging lesson. Neither do you want to be that adult that roflstomps all the little kids at Jenga and calls them losers.

There's a desirability spectrum here and the perspectives on this game we are discussing and motivations for playing it are coming from opposite ends of this spectrum. One one side we have uncompromising and relentless pursuit of the win at the cost of all else, which is something we admire in things like tournaments, the Olympics, and war. On the other end of the scale there are board games played with emotionally traumatized kids in an after-school program (some victims of abuse and/or in foster care) where winning is still the surface-level agreed upon objective, but the real mission is to learn how to have a positive interaction with another human. We might tolerate rage-quitting, BMing, smack talk, personal attack mind games and the like on the competitive end of the spectrum and brush it off as an expected side-effect of champions hyped up for the win, but on the side of the spectrum I play those behaviors are dangerous and damaging to our true objective.

We desperately need competitiveness in our society, but we also need honor, mercy, compassion, respect, patience, and grace.

I don't intend to demean competitive players at all; I can respect anyone with the discipline to train, whatever it is they have chosen to excel at. I don't expect tournament players to care one bit about their opponent's enjoyment, but in casual play I believe it is crucial. My perspective is coming from middle school kids who began to use their expensive and competitive decks (which they had copied from tournament players) to beat down and even bully other players who built their own $5 deck into thinking they were "bad at Magic". I designed this deck to prove a point. When it comes to a game played for fun, while winning is fun (and you should try to win) winning at the cost of your opponents' enjoyment is self-defeating, because you may never have anyone to play with again.

Yeah, in general I find land destruction to be kind of game breaking.

I do not have much experience with Planeswalkers. Would Pyrohemia not hit them since they are not creatures?

I have never had much luck with Tribute. My opponents always pick a token or something unimportant. I put Devour Flesh in to kill my own walls, really, and I can't do that with Tribute.

That was often the outcome, yeah. The goal was more to showcase the (often overlooked by kids) deck-building consideration of your opponent's enjoyment. MTG isn't the Olympics; it's a game. We don't approach the table to completely dominate, we both want to have fun and maybe learn something. I like to think they were also able to apply this mindset to talking to each other, but I am not too sure about that.

I had a big debate with a group of friends recently about the legal ramifications of human virtual consciousness and does having a romantic relationship with an AI count as cheating, even after you have been "uploaded" yourself? It reminded me of a lesson where I was teaching evolutionary fitness and a student asked what my fitness was. Since I had not yet reproduced my fitness was near zero, making me a failure in the eyes of life. The few humans who sought that kind of "success" are viewed historically as monsters, and probably rightfully so. I had to explain to the class that while humans are animals, we are often an exception when it comes to anything behavioral. Evolution has long been holding the reigns of life, but humans choices have deviated too far from the basic rules that govern how life changes over time for us to really be considered within the same category as other life, so far as it relates to evolution. I believe experiments like your deck-building evolver are more important than ever. We need to understand these kind of complex systems before we start messing with them on the scale that humans are beginning to be capable of.

I wonder if machine learning could be applied by having an AI study all the decks posed online to develop some sort of algorithm and what kind of decks this AI would then start making itself?

They are so spicy, right? I went red so I could add in Manabarbs and Vortex, since lifegain was so meta in my group at the time.

I think you are right about narratives. Most children when they see the truth of human impact on ecosystems are deeply troubled, because they recognize it as unnatural (natural greed taken to extreme is unnatural). I have seen kids balling on fieldtrips to the landfill. Were it not for the narratives and traditions telling them it's OK they would flip out when they recognize their own trash. They would come back angry and ready to challenge our way of life, and we wouldn't want that, would we?

Sometimes I forget how Warhammer grimdark I can get when I go full-on biological inevitability. Don't worry; it's all gonna be OK (it isn't).

Biology is awesome, except for the wide-spread rejection of scientific thought overall here in the U.S. I used to be lab, but now I teach. When I'm lucky I get to teach mtg, which is what brings my cheap/ridiculous decks here.

You can't make more babies if you don't have the resources, and you get resources by being greedy. With finite resources anytime you take some it hurts everyone else. The very act of living, for all life, requires taking life (or that which sustains it) from others. So only take what you need, right?

Many people like to think that nature is fair, balanced, and intrinsically good, but that we (humans) are broken in our greed. The science on populations and ecology does not support this view, however. Organisms never choose the success of others over themselves, altruism always has ulterior motives. Populations do not willingly control their own numbers, they expand until some outside limiting factor reigns them in. Species do not engage in some sort of natural conservatism, they take what they want until it is gone...

Most of them simply lack the capacity to take more than they need. What makes us different is not the presence of greed, but merely the ability to act on it. Being "structure users" like you say allows us to capture more resources and store them, manipulate environments to our advantage, and control all other life to furnish our desires well beyond our needs.

In other words, take any single organism and give them the "special" capacities of a human, our minds, imagination, dexterity, etc., and they will exhibit the same ecosystem-breaking hording behaviors for which we are so well known.

I don't have any idea what any of this has to do with mtg, but I am convinced that mill players must be the philosophers of the community.

It's really just my go-to excuse for ignoring formats, but you aren't wrong. My view on it, as a biologist, is that greed is the most original and natural motivation from which most other motivations are derived. Rule #1 of Being an Organism: Be greedy or die. (For reference Rule #2 is: Make the most babies, but thankfully most of us ignore that one.) That is also why I find spirituality so compelling and at the same time difficult; it generally asks you to deny that which is most natural and intrinsic to us as living things. I have always found the most difficult things to be the most worthwhile, and what could be more difficult then to be at war with your very nature?

Yeah, I don't concern myself much with formats. If I can I will stay legal, but it is a secondary concern coming well after the deck's purpose and cost. Anyways, cost provides a better control for powercreep in print than formats do, I think. I mean, what is the goal of formats except to sell more cards? I won't play into their greedy money grabbing "Standard"s ;)

It is something I have considered, but since the vast majority of my decks are designed to teach a deck type or mechanic I wanted students to see the card exactly like the originals. I even tried printing out card faces and laminating them on to lands, but you could tell the difference and it ruined it. I try to remember to tag my decks as Educational, but I forget and it can be hard to explain sometimes.

I like it and am curious to dabble with Forecast, since I never have. I dropped the Paranoid Delusions and a Merfolk to put 4 in. Thank you, sir.

That is kinda what I had found, but not until after I had already bought the cards. Mill seems to be a hard playstyle for budget, but I needed a deck to teach the concept of alternative wincons.